Tim Parker speaks after being selected by the Vancouver Whitecaps FC in the first round of the 2015 Major League Soccer SuperDraft in Philadelphia. The rangy centre back was arguably the team's most successful draft pick. Matt Rourke / Associated Press files

In most pro drafts, the final player selected is cynically dubbed “Mr. Irrelevant,” the grown-up equivalent of being picked last for sandlot baseball.

Some of those players do indeed fade into irrelevance, relegated to mere one-line Wikipedia footnotes, while others have established themselves as bonafide pros.

Ryan Succop was drafted last in 2009 by the Kansas City Chiefs, but his NFL career is a decade long — his 160 games played is the most of any NFL Mr. Irrelevant — and has been one of the most accurate kickers in the league.

Patric Hornqvist may have gone last to the Nashville Predators in the 2005 NHL draft — 230th overall — but he has scored 218 goals and 437 points in 683 career games, and is the only Mr. Irrelevant to have his name inscribed on the Stanley Cup.

But they are the standouts in a long, long list of forgotten names, ones too obscure to even be fair trivia questions.

The MLS SuperDraft’s first two rounds go Friday in Chicago (rounds 3 and 4 to be held “via conference call at a later date”), and the way the league is trending, the entire class may just be Mr. Irrelevants.

The annual university draft was, at one time, of great import to the league, as teams could pick up domestic talent and build their rosters with them. But as Major League Soccer has evolved, become a higher-calibre league, it’s become more of a destination for players from outside of North America. No longer are teams stuffing their rosters with draft picks; players are either developed internally through academies or brought in from abroad.

Plus, by the time players enter the draft, their prime development years have been spent in programs that don’t always match the professional environment that USL teams can provide.

The Philadelphia Union made their position abundantly clear Wednesday when they traded all five of their picks (Nos. 13, 29, 37, 61 and 85) in Friday’s draft to expansion side FC Cincinnati for $150,000 in 2019 General Allocation Money and $50,000 in GAM, which is conditional on the performance of the players selected.

Union sporting director Ernst Tanner was blunt about his assessment of the draft, saying he didn’t think there were any players they could select that would make their USL side, Bethlehem Steel FC, let alone the middling MLS side that finished sixth in the Eastern Conference.

“When evaluating how we want to build our roster for the 2019 season and beyond, we decided that acquiring this money is the best use of our SuperDraft resources,” Tanner said in a release. “Not only will we look to continue both signing Union Academy products for the first team and Bethlehem Steel FC, as well as attracting young talent from abroad, we believe that this sum of money will help us complete crucial signings ahead of the upcoming campaign.”

The Whitecaps, for their part, have just two picks on Friday — 35th and 83rd. They shipped their No. 11 overall spot to New England when they signed Kei Kamara in December of 2017, and their third-round pick to Orlando last month when they acquired Victor ‘P.C.’ Giro from Orlando.

Aside from Tim Parker, Jake Nerwinski, left, is the only recent SuperDraft pick to find success with the Whitecaps. Nerwinski was taken No. 7 overall by the Caps in 2017, ahead of second-round pick Francis de Vries, who now plies his trade for Swedish third-division side NykÃ¶pings BIS.Neil Davidson /
THE CANADIAN PRESS

Historically, the Caps haven’t unearthed a trove of talent in the SuperDraft, apart from fullback Jake Nerwinski (No. 7 overall, 2017) and centre back Tim Parker (No. 13 overall, 2015). In 2013, they did select Kekuta Manneh and Erik Hurtado at Nos. 4 and 5, respectively, and snagged Darren Mattocks with the No. 2 pick the year previous, but no player taken lower than Parker has cracked the first-team roster.

Even a top pick doesn’t assure success: Omar Salgado was the first overall pick in 2011, and he scored just one goal in 29 appearances over four years and the parties acrimoniously parted ways in 2014. Making that pick look bad was the fact Darlington Nagbe went No. 2. He’s developed into one of the best midfielders in MLS and one who tormented the Caps for years as a member of the Portland Timbers.

With no first-round picks this year, it’s unlikely the Caps will be adding any players of permanence. None of their picks from last year are still with the organization.

But there’s a chance he may be scooped up by the draft’s biggest buyers — FC Cincinnati. The Orange and Blue not only have the No. 1 overall pick but nine others, including three of the first 16 in the draft.

And since Cincinnati’s Alan Koch coached Camara during his time with Whitecaps FC2, the MLS expansion side could be a possible destination for him.

There is, despite the draft’s waning importance, still some elite talent available for Koch and Co., including two other Canadians who could go in the top five: Victoria’s Callum Montgomery, who established himself as the draft’s best centre back with solid credentials at UNC Charlotte, and Brampton’s Tajon Buchanan, who starred at Syracuse University. Also working in Buchanan’s favour is his inclusion in the 2019 seven-player Generation Adidas class, meaning his salary wouldn’t count against the MLS salary cap.

Koch has been active in building his roster, even acquiring former Caps SuperDraftees Mattocks and goalie Spencer Richey, along with trading for Vancouver centre back Kendall Waston. Despite some of the proven names already on his team, Koch knows it will be a slow process to success, and is expecting a rocky start to MLS play with nine out of their first 10 games coming against playoff teams from last season.

“We’ve done some very good pieces of business so far to get the pieces we have in place, but we still have work to do in the remainder of this window. We’ll have work to do in the summer window, and we’ll have more work to do next year.

“We’re not going to come out of the gates blazing. It takes time. It takes time to gel a team. You can even see that from our own experiences. Look at last year in the USL. It wasn’t MLS, but we’re playing the same game and we were building a team in the same manner. We struggled for the first few games, and then we went undefeated all summer.”